Very Verrine: Dinner in a Glass

What you’re looking at is the leftovers from yesterday’s lunch.  They don't look so bad, do they?  The original was just a salad – romaine, celery, tomato, scallions, carrots, raisins, tuna and a mustard vinaigrette – but when I couldn’t find a storage container and grabbed a jelly jar instead, the remains of the day started looking better.

My salad-in-a-glass was expedient, but these days – and for the past few years – chefs in Paris have thought long, hard and super-creatively about presenting their precious products in glasses and the results have been stunning.

Today, you can go to a restaurant and get a little amuse bouche in a slender vodka glass or an elaborate dessert in a slimmed-down lowball and in between be served an app in a glass, vegetables in a glass and maybe even a glass-enclosed pot-au-feu.  It’s a certified trend. (See the recent article in the LA Times; recipes included.)

The first meal-in-a-glass that I can remember (aside from my mom’s chocolate Slim-Fasts or my own sundaes, which weren’t meant to be meals but could have been) was some time in the late-90s at Petrossian in Paris when Phillippe Conticini was the chef.  My friend Nick Malgieri and I had a multi-course meal there in which every dish was served in a glass with custom-designed flatware – all of it long-handled – and the whole event finished with each of us being served a tray of desserts.  I don’t have the best memory, but I think we both had five glasses and each glass had eight elements (or maybe we had eight glasses, each with five different layers).  It was a wow meal and it wore out our brains – so much to taste; so, so, so much to think about. 

Nowadays, these kinds of dishes, called verrines, after the glasses they’re served in, are everywhere in Paris, especially in pastry shops.  At Pierre Herme’s they’re an art form – no surprise, I know. 

I’m not thinking art this weekend, but I do have glasses galore...

Jellied gazpacho?  Crab-avocado salad?  Seared scallops, mango salsa and a scallop ceviche to finish it?  Hmm – could be beautiful in the martini glass.  Layered beef tartar? That might be great in the snifter.  Actually, just a few tablespoons of chopped beef, a teaspoon or so each of chopped onions and salty capers and an adorable quail egg as the topper, would be a perfect hors d’oeuvre in that shapely glass that I’ve never used for anything but short flowers.  I could get into this.

Comments

[Dorie]

Carol, it seems like the just-a-taste verrines you saw in Paris are very popular in restaurants for amuses-bouches, but first courses and desserts are also being "glassified". I think the whole thing is a lot of fun -- and very pretty, too.

[ParisBreakfasts]

I was fascinated by all the verrines I saw in Paris in October - but they ar every small glasses. Just a taste.
I wonder if Americans could go for that.
I loved them.

[Dorie]

Lemon and bay-leaf panna cotta. How odd to see something this unusual served in two restaurants. Do you think it's just coincidental? Sounds unlikely, right?

There's a restaurant in the Chelsea section of Manhattan that I like a lot (and which I'll post on soon) called Klee, and the chef serves vegetables in Mason Jars. And at Guy Savoy's Atelier de Maitre Albert in Paris, the dessert cart had (and probably still has -- does anyone know?) several desserts served in Mason Jars, among them a wonderful rice pudding.

While cooking in Mason Jars and constructing food in glasses are not the same, they're both really, really interesting.

[Mmm]

Coincidentally, I had dinner last week at Gaia, a restaurant in Greenwich, CT, where quite a number of dishes, from appetizers through desserts, are cooked in and served from or in covered mason-jars of various sizes. Not sure if these mason jars are considered verrines, but the LA Times article you referenced mentions that "Nearly all the desserts in the restaurant's Le Salon are verrines. One has layers of bay leaf-flavored panna cotta, Mara des Bois strawberries, lemon gelée, lemon crumble and strawberry sorbet. Another has salted caramel ice cream, chocolate-cumin tuile and Madong chocolate cream." Similarly, Gaia serves several desserts-in-mason-jars, among which were a lemon and bay leaf panna cotta, and an incredible sea salt and caramel-topped "cheesecake."

And I, for one, am hooked.